External helpers

Detail

Babel has a few helper functions that’ll be placed at the top of the generated code if needed so it’s not inlined multiple times throughout that file. This may become an issue if you have multiple files, especially when you’re sending them to the browser. gzip alleviates most of this concern but it’s still not ideal.

You can tell Babel to not place any declarations at the top of your files and instead just point them to a reference contained within the external helpers.

Getting the external helpers

To build the helpers, you will need to use babel-cli. You can install babel-cli with:

npm install babel-cli --save-dev

This will add babel-external-helpers to your .bin.

You can output the file using

./node_modules/.bin/babel-external-helpers [options] > helpers.js

You need to import/inject this file before executing your own code (instructions below).

Injecting the external helpers

Node

Browser

In a browser environment you can use a <script> tag to inject the babelHelpers into the window object.

Adds external helpers via a babel plugin.

Detail

Babel has a few helper functions that’ll be placed at the top of the generated code if needed so it’s not inlined multiple times throughout that file. This may become an issue if you have multiple files, especially when you’re sending them to the browser. gzip alleviates most of this concern but it’s still not ideal.

You can tell Babel to not place any declarations at the top of your files and instead just point them to a reference contained within the external helpers.

Getting the external helpers

To build the helpers, you will need to use babel-cli. You can install babel-cli with:

npm install babel-cli --save-dev

This will add babel-external-helpers to your .bin.

You can output the file using

./node_modules/.bin/babel-external-helpers [options] > helpers.js

You need to import/inject this file before executing your own code (instructions below).